After @Offray’s pointer to fengari, I found this interesting page of examples: Made with Remarkable!
It’s quite nice to see a fairly complete implementation of Lua for the web. Lua is a much simpler and more approachable language than modern JavaScript, so it’s great to see a strong pathway for using that in the browser.
@akkartik, is there any chance it provides a pathway for your LÖVE-based programs to appear on the web as well? I guess there are efforts like love.js already, but they seem to use Emscripten, so perhaps Fengari offers a nicer route (depending on whether it assists with graphics APIs). Browsers make some things more difficult though, especially saving state as recently discussed with TiddlyWiki, so perhaps you’re not that interested in deploying to the web.
Yeah, love.js and emscripten have felt fairly heavyweight, whereas fengari feels more in the Lua “spirit”. So I don’t particularly care that it doesn’t support the LÖVE APIs. That stuff is easy to port.
I’ve historically not cared about deploying to the web when the suggestion comes from drive-by commenters. Yes it might get some adoption, but it also seemed harder to differentiate from existing Javascript projects. However, when someone says the existing stuff on the web isn’t good enough for reasons that seem more aligned with my values, and there’s a substantive commitment to use something, and they’ve gone to the trouble of researching alternatives and uncovering a nice platform like fengari – then my ears perk up.
Wondering if anyone here has opinions on or even experience with Earthstar. It seems to claim to enable local-first software in the browser. Coupled with a user-friendly language such as Lua, it could be the basis of a nice malleable system based on the Web.
Earthstar looks like an interesting effort! I haven’t tried it yet myself… Are there any example projects based on Earthstar available to try out somewhere…?
There’s a tutorial on building a chat app, which can be considered an example project. I haven’t found anything else.